The Seven Wastes

Once I read an article by K. Beck which said that our problem is not that we don't have enough time. Such a problem would be untenable. Rather, our problem is that we have too much to do. "Too much to do" can be solved. We should accept that we only have so much time, and do the most important things possible with that time.

If the goal is to use the time we have more productively then we must identify and eliminate the time-wasters that rob us. Focusing on tasks instead of social situations can help, but as human beings we sometimes need a break in order to focus our thoughts and allow our minds to mull over issues. Totally eliminating off-task time is not as productive as it sounds, though most of us could spend a little more time on-task each day. One might notice that coffee breaks, smoke breaks, phone calls, and small office conversations are not listed above. Those are necessary to some extent (though Tim as an ex-smoker might argue that smoking is unnecessary and detrimental), and are not the great wholesale time wasters that the Seven Wastes expose. Compared to the seven wastes listed above, individual off-task time is insignificant and unimportant. Indeed, forcing the employees nose to the grindstone in a stupidly wasteful system will result in no appreciable increase in productivity, while at the same time decreasing satisfaction and driving the best workers away.

The problem is that our time-on-task may be full of wasted effort. If we have not been sufficiently trained to see waste in progress. we may be wasting time by optimizing the wrong things. This is like straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.

There are some interesting and even counter-intuitive items in the list. Some of these will creep unbidden into your work experience and strangle your organizational efficiency. One really should read Implementing Lean Software Development and/or Lean Software Development (same authors) to get a deeper understanding of waste, but since this guide is called "In A Flash", we enumerate a few instances here.

Partially-done work is any work that has begun, and has not completed. Organizations will often attempt to get more done by doing more things at once, which is merely adding waste to the process. If work is to be completed as soon as possible, there must be a minimal amount of work to be done at any point in time. The symptom of this kind of waste is that you have a hundred items 90% done. In code this is extremely troubling, because the main line of code development will outpace the branches (or working copies) until the mainline can no longer gracefully accept the branches' changes. This leads to rewor. The waste item task switching is related.As my old manager Bob B. used to say "Fooooocccuuuuuuusssss!" The answer is to do less, more frequently. This is actually not hard technically, but can be difficult politically. The organization must reach a point where it is not bragging about how much work it has in progress.

Extra features are stories built on speculation that they will be useful or desirable, but which are not actually used by the customers. This waste is doubly damning because the work consumed development dollars, and also an opportunity cost in that more desirable features had to wait. A team may complete a number of features only to be told by the end users that they "didn't do anything." One way to mitigate this problem is to only implement stories requested by the business, but that answer is only helpful to development. For business, the problem is only assigning the most-needed stories for development. It is very difficult to do this if the decision-makers are not users of the software, and are not very closely associated with the actual users.

Relearning is necessary whenever the process captures information in order to complete one phase of the task, and then the next cell in the process has to reverse-engineer their input to determine its purpose. It occurs when the team had information when it started one critical component of the product, but later must rediscover how that part works. Relearning occurs when only one member of the team understands a particular siloed area of the application, and someone else must work in that area. The solutions in an agile setting are to involve the whole team in a feature, to capture requirements and expectations in Acceptance Tests and Unit Tests, and to collaborate (pair programming) to reduce the costs of relearning when it is necessary. If you find you have to reverse-engineer the code you are working on, you are hip-deep in relearning waste.

Hand-offs are sort of the evil twin of task switching, and is worsened by relearning. A classic symptom is when there is a quality control group and a documentation group, and neither are involved in the development process. Instead, they are handed a release to test or document while the programmers move on to the next task. A classic waterfall hand-off is from requirements to design, and from design to implementation.

Information and momentum are lost at these boundaries, and responsibility is surrendered. At the point of hand-off, the originator no longer feels responsible for the product (a violation of "see the whole"). Often this leads to localized optimizations, where one group takes pride in (or worse is rewarded for) its ability to outrace the next even though this slows the organization as a whole and leads to partially-done work waste.

An Agile answer is to work as a whole team, even if responsibilities are parsed to different people on the team (for documentation, QC, etc).

Delays are simply wait-states or queues. Perhaps too much work was handed-off to QC, and the organization has to wait until the beleagured testers get around to testing the code. Perhaps there are questions about requirements that have to wait until the next monthly stakeholder meeting. Perhaps there are development or requirement silos and work must be queued for the one person who is familiar with the subject matter. Agile groups often assign a scrum master to clear up all delays every single day. By pairing on all tasks, agile groups break down silos. In these ways, we help to eliminate the waste of delay.

Defects are multi-causal. Some of them may arise from sloppy programming practices (especially if the team is overworked). Some of them may arise from an individual's incomplete understanding of a subject area. Sometimes the code is riddled with technical debt and programmers cannot accurately predict the outcome of their actions. Sometimes code is complex, and a long chain of decisions are altered by a small change in an innocent-looking piece of code. An agile team attacks defects in a very active way by pairing, unit-testing, and acceptance-testing. Continuous integration aids the team by running every test that exists every day (multiple times per day). The agile team takes a very serious stance regarding build-breaking changes, and treats a failing test as a broken build.